Licensing
k8shell core services are licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (AGPL-3.0). In addition, some components are available as Early Access — production-ready capabilities you can start using today, before they reach general availability.
Early Access
Join our Early Access program and help shape what comes next. We onboard new teams gradually as our capacity allows — to register, use the Early Access registration page.
Early Access gives you access to the full k8shell platform — everything in the open-source release plus the production-ready components and integrations needed to run k8shell at scale, along with prioritized triage and a response commitment from the k8shell team.
Any feature marked with the badge 
in this documentation falls under the Early Access program.
Feature comparison
| Core services | k8shell OSS | Early Access |
|---|---|---|
| SSH Proxy | ✓ | ✓ |
| Identity (file-based provider) | ✓ | ✓ |
| Provisioner | ✓ | ✓ |
| k8shelld | ✓ | ✓ |
| k8shell CLI | ✓ | ✓ |
| Helm charts & installation scripts | ✓ | ✓ |
| Workspace base images | ✓ | ✓ |
| Early Access additions | k8shell OSS | Early Access |
|---|---|---|
| Identity providers (OAuth GitHub, GitLab; device code flow) | — | ✓ |
| API Server (workspace, user management, WebSocket, reverse proxy) | — | ✓ |
| Authz (OPA Policy server) | — | ✓ |
| Console (terminal, file browser) | — | ✓ |
| Session (tracking, recording) | — | ✓ |
| SSH Shield | — | ✓ |
| Worktrace | — | ✓ |
| Monitoring, observability (OTel, Prometheus, Grafana) | — | ✓ |
| ArgoCD-based GitOps deployment (Vault and cert-manager integration) | — | ✓ |
AGPL-v3.0
Unless indicated otherwise, k8shell open-source components are released under the AGPL — a copyleft license that ensures k8shell and any derivative works remain open. If you distribute a modified version, or run one as a network service accessible to others, you must make the source of your modifications available under the same license.
Your own workloads running inside k8shell workspaces are not affected by this license.
The full license text is available in the k8shell repository.